Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 6:36-45, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 14
- Date: Sunday, April 27, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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The Responsibility of Representation
This week, I read an interview with a man discussing his background, life, and career. He was a career Foreign Service Officer. I had always thought they were simply called diplomats, but they are also known as FSOs.
He described the training required in addition to college and the other preparation for his career. He had to complete an orientation lasting several weeks to a few months called A-100. Before being posted overseas, diplomats undergo extensive training in how to represent the United States and follow diplomatic protocols.
It is important that they learn how to enter another culture without needlessly causing offense. In some countries, for example, a thumbs-up gesture carries an offensive meaning. I remember when we hosted a group of Ugandans last year. After a few days, I finally thought to ask, “This is not offensive in your country, is it?”
I should have asked that at the beginning, but they assured me it was fine. They were not one of the countries that’s offended by it. Diplomats are taught how to represent the United States without needlessly offending the people among whom they serve. They study ethics, potential conflicts of interest, and how to represent their country wholeheartedly.
They learn the internal workings of the State Department and how to work effectively with others. They also receive security training because not every overseas assignment is safe.
They study information specific to their assigned country because every posting is different. They may also receive refresher training when transferred from one country to another. And even within the same country, you can go to different cities and they may be different.
I had assumed the president simply appointed someone who then went overseas to represent us. In reality, extensive training is involved. Representing the United States well requires preparation because representing someone else is a great responsibility.
If you hire an attorney to represent you, you want that person to be thoroughly trained. You do not want someone saying, “I watched _Law & Order_ a few times, so I am ready.”
No, you want somebody with actual training. Even when I send one of my children to relay a message to another, I am very clear about what I want said. I do not say, “Go tell your sister to clean her room,” because that can sound like one child ordering another around.
Instead, I say, “Tell her, ‘Daddy said to clean your room.'” I tell them exactly what to say because they are representing me. It’s a tremendous responsibility to represent somebody else.
Jesus likewise prepared His disciples to represent Him and the Father. Before taking a two-week detour for Palm Sunday and Easter, we had been studying the book of Luke. And we’re going to pick that back up today in Luke chapter 6.
We are returning to what Bible scholars call the Sermon on the Plain, that covers some of the same things that Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount, some different things from what Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount, and the most obvious distinction is that one was preached on a mountain and the other on a level place. That’s why they gave them the names that they did. But as Jesus is presenting this sermon, He is preparing His disciples to represent Him well and to represent the Father well.
We should keep that context in mind as we read Luke 6:36–45.
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged. And do not condemn that you will not be condemned.
Pardon and you will be pardoned. Give and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, for by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you in return.
And he also spoke a parable to them. A blind man cannot guide a blind man, can he? Will they not both fall into a pit?
A pupil is not above his teacher, but everyone after he has been fully trained will be like his teacher. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye, when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye?
You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye. For there is no good tree which produces bad fruit, nor on the other hand a bad tree which produces good fruit. For each tree is known by its own fruit.
For men do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they pick grapes from a briar bush. The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good, and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil. For his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart. So again, as we look through this sermon, I’ve told you before, because this is not our first time looking at a piece of the Sermon on the Plain. As we look at this sermon, I’ve told you, we have to keep in mind who He’s talking to.
He is talking to His disciples. That context changes how we understand His words. When I say disciples, I do not mean only the twelve apostles.
Nor do I mean that every listener had already made a final commitment to follow Him. At this stage in His ministry, a disciple could simply be someone who had begun listening to and learning from His teaching. They wanted to hear what He had to say, but many had not yet committed themselves fully to Him.
They stood somewhere between the larger crowd and the inner circle. Many were still on the fence. He’s talking to them about what it means to follow him.
When He speaks about the rich and the poor, ignoring His audience can make it sound as though poverty is inherently good and wealth inherently evil. And it’s understandable that we would take it that way. But in context, He is not condemning possession itself. He is warning against being unwilling to lose anything for His sake.
He is not dividing them by what they possess but by what they are willing to surrender. Likewise, when Jesus speaks about judging and condemning, He is not explaining how to earn salvation. He is preparing people who are considering discipleship to understand how followers of Jesus must conduct themselves. As they followed Him and ministered in His name, it was imperative that they obey verse 36: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
The remaining verses show what it takes to represent Him well. If we say, “I have decided to follow Jesus. I have trusted Him as Savior.
I am following Him as Lord.” what should that life look like? This does not tell us everything that we need to know.
He was addressing specific problems, but this is a pretty good place to start. To understand the whole Christian life, we must read all of Scripture and all Jesus taught, but this passage gives us a strong starting point and addresses several things that can keep us from representing Him well. And as we read through this Sermon on the Plain.
It’s a lot like the Sermon on the Mount in that everything we read there is basically the opposite of what the Pharisees did. And up to this point, people were looking at what it means to follow God, what it means to walk with God, and they were looking at the Pharisees. Those were the religious people.
Those were the religious examples. And people said, if we want to be close to God, I mean, the Pharisees look like they’re doing it, so maybe we’re supposed to do the things the Pharisees do. Jesus was pointing out, as He did so many times through His ministry, that you actually want to do the opposite of the things the Pharisees did.
Acting Like People Who Have Received Mercy
Everything He presents is the opposite of the way the Pharisees conducted their ministry. So one of the big things that we need to do if we want to represent our Father well is that we should act like people who have received God’s mercy. Have you ever met someone who claimed to follow Jesus but acted as though mercy were not even part of the vocabulary?
I have often said that some of the most wonderful, gracious, godly, and gentle people I have known were in church—and some of the meanest were also in church. I am not talking about this church. So there is no need to look around and wonder, “Who is it? Is it me?”
We recently had the apostles portrayed here for the Living Lord’s Supper: “Is it I, Lord?” No, I’m not talking about anybody in this room.
But if you have never met a mean person in church, you have not been around church very long. There is something about mere religiosity—and I distinguish that from a relationship with Jesus Christ— that can cause people who focus on rules and good works to lose compassion. Jesus tells us to act like people who have received God’s mercy.
If we keep before us the mercy we have received—remembering what we deserved from a holy God and what we received instead—we should become among the most merciful people anyone encounters. Being merciful does not mean excusing sin or declaring it acceptable, but it does mean understanding who we are as sinners. If we compare ourselves only with other people, we may appear righteous. We can probably find somebody that makes us look really holy.
When we compare ourselves with God’s standard of sinless perfection, however, we see the thoughts, attitudes, and actions that reveal how sinful we are before Him. And we understand what we deserve from a holy God, that we deserve judgment, we deserve condemnation, we deserve separation from Him. If you are in Jesus Christ, you do not receive the condemnation you deserve because your sins were paid for at the cross. Instead, you receive immeasurable mercy.
When we realize how much has been forgiven of us, it becomes a lot harder for us to not show mercy to other people. That’s what He’s telling us here when He tells us not to judge. That word is often overused.
Matthew 7:1—”Do not judge so that you will not be judged”—is among the most misused verses in Scripture. It doesn’t mean that we don’t discern right and wrong. It doesn’t mean that we don’t speak what God says about right and wrong.
Nor is Jesus teaching that refusing to judge others removes the condemnation of our own sin. This is not an alternate plan of salvation. “If I am simply nonjudgmental, God will overlook my sin.”
If declaring everyone else acceptable were enough to remove our guilt, the cross would have been unnecessary. But Jesus paid an infinite price, as we have emphasized throughout the Easter season. He paid an incredibly high price because our sin is costly.
Jesus is addressing something else. He is describing how we treat others while representing our Lord and how they may respond to us as a result. So when he says, do not judge and you will not be judged, right there in front of them, they have the Pharisees as examples of people who tended to judge and they tended to judge harshly.
They judged harshly, hastily, and hypocritically. I appreciate the alliteration.
But they tended to judge in those three ways, all of which we’re told in Scripture not to do. They tended to have no mercy at all. As a matter of fact, the way this verse gets used, I think shows we have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is He’s told us not to do, and what I think this would have meant to them in their day.
When we say a particular sin is wrong, the world often calls that judgment. That is not what Jesus means here. To judge in the forbidden sense is to place ourselves in the seat of authority and decide right and wrong on our own. Declaring something right or wrong apart from God’s Word would be judging because you and I do not set the standard. When we step out of the place of authority and let the Master speak through His Word, we are not assuming the role of judge.
The Pharisees, however, used their traditions and preferences to create standards that suited them—overlooking some offenses while condemning others. Therefore, “do not judge” does not mean remaining silent about what God’s Word says. It means removing ourselves from the seat of authority and allowing the Judge to be the Judge.
So we take ourselves out of saying, you don’t need me to tell you that that’s wrong. God’s Word tells you, you don’t need me to decide that that’s right or wrong. God’s Word already decided that.
As servants of Jesus, we have to recognize we’re not the authorities to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. He’s already made those judgments. When Jesus says not to judge, He tells us not to try people according to arbitrary standards.
We must not say, “That is wrong because I think it should be.” And if we don’t treat people that way, they’re less likely to treat us that way. It’s a very simple principle that he’s teaching us here.
If we do not place ourselves above others as the final authority, they are less likely to treat us that way in return. And he says, do not condemn. These are similar words, but he says, do not condemn and you will not be condemned.
The Pharisees would declare people guilty and call for punishment. “Did you see what he did? Here is what should happen to him.”
And they would just decide somebody was guilty based on their standards, based on their traditions, nothing to do with God’s Word or God’s law. They would just make the decision. And then with no thought to what God’s Word actually says, they would make the decision of what they thought ought to happen to somebody.
The Pharisees treated their opinions as though they carried divine authority. We don’t get to do that. He says instead, pardon and you’ll be pardoned.
Again, this is not about earning salvation. God’s provision for our judgment and salvation is a separate issue. He’s talking about as we go out to represent him, the way we do it, the way we reflect him determines how people will respond to our ministry and to our message. He says, pardon and you will be pardoned.
We’re called to show grace to other people. If we are the kind of people who show grace to other people, it will be shown to us. One of the ways we act like people who have received God’s mercy is by being gracious to others.
There is a time to call out sin. There is always a time to stand without compromise on the Word of God.
But the way we do it often determines how ready people are to hear it. The Bible teaches that the gospel message is offensive. For us to trust Jesus as our Savior, we have to believe and acknowledge we were sinners, that we are sinners.
My childhood pastor used to say that the church and the Hells Angels are the only two organizations you must admit to being bad before you can join. He was not wrong. We have to acknowledge there’s something wrong in me that I cannot fix that incurred the wrath of a holy God and had to be paid for, that it could only be paid for because Jesus Christ suffered, bled, and died on the cross to pay for it and rose again three days later to prove it.
The gospel offends the human flesh that insists, “I am fine,” but we should not add unnecessary personal offense through the way we treat others. Another way we act like people who have received God’s mercy is by being generous toward others. And this doesn’t even necessarily mean financially, although that’s part of it, just in the way that we deal with other people, do we have a spirit of generosity about us?
He talks about this in verse 38. As a child, I heard this verse and wondered what it meant. It makes more sense when we understand how grain was measured in that day.
A buyer would pay an agreed price for a specified quantity of grain. You want to make sure you’re not being cheated. The seller would pour grain into the agreed measuring container.
It says in verse 38, pour into your lap a good measure, press down, shaken together, and running over. They would press the grain down to fit as much as possible into the container. Then they would shake the container so the grain settled and add more, repeating the process until it was filled to overflowing.
Jesus uses that image to describe a spirit of generosity toward others. And again, it doesn’t necessarily mean just financially. That’s important, but we can be generous with other people in other ways.
We can be generous with our time, our attention, our effort, our expertise. Every one of us has something we can share generously with those around us. If that is how we treat others, they are more likely to respond similarly.
And so we act like people who’ve received God’s mercy. We can afford to be generous with other people because God has been exceedingly generous with us. Again, when we consider what we deserve from a holy God because of our sins, and we look and see what we’ve received instead, if we’re honest, we have to recognize that God has been far more generous with each of us than we deserve.
I know he’s been far more generous with me than I deserve. Therefore, I can afford to be generous toward others. Jesus also calls us to examine ourselves before trying to direct anyone else.
The Pharisees would try to show other people the way without giving any thought to what was going on in their own hearts and their own lives. And they were hypocrites. Verse 39 teaches that we cannot lead others well if we are not following God ourselves.
That’s why he says a blind man cannot guide a blind man, can he? No, they’ll both end up in a pit. Have you ever had someone follow you in another car while you became lost?
That’s happened to me before. The person behind you became lost as well. Because they were following you and you were lost. If we claim to represent Christ and lead others to Him while refusing to walk with Him ourselves, we cannot lead them well.
We’re like the blind man leading the other blind man and we both fall into a ditch. We also do not rise above the one we follow. If you look at verse 40, he says, a pupil, a student, is not above his teacher, but everyone after he’s been fully trained will be like his teacher.
So in this example, the student doesn’t rise above the teacher. Instead, the student becomes like the teacher. We cannot refuse to follow Jesus and expect those we lead somehow to become like Him.
Those who follow us are most likely to become like Jesus as we ourselves become like Jesus. Otherwise, they should stop following us and find someone who is following Him faithfully. We become like the one we follow.
The Log, the Speck, and Our Own Shortcomings
As we examine ourselves, we must first address our own shortcomings. That is clear from Jesus’ illustration of the speck and the log. I remember being in third grade when my father, who was my Sunday school teacher, taught this story.
I believe the lesson came from one of the other Gospels, and he asked whether we should address the log in our own eye first or the speck in our brother’s eye. Wanting to give the proper Sunday school answer, all of us children replied, “Of course we help the other person first.” That was completely wrong.
I remember that lesson because it forced me to change my understanding. See, we’re not talking about helping people here. We’re talking about we can’t help people and show them the way if we’re not walking in the right way ourselves.
We become hypocrites. Jesus describes someone preoccupied with a small fault in another person.
Meanwhile, that person neglects major problems in his own life. Sometimes we must step back, address our own shortcomings before the Lord, and only then try to help someone else. And then we need to pay attention to the fruit that we bear.
The Fruit Reveals the Tree
In verses 43 through 45, Jesus contrasts good and bad trees. If you have planted a garden, you know that at best you harvest what you planted. Sometimes nothing grows, but you cannot expect a crop different from the seed you sowed. You don’t plant grass seed and hope for tomatoes.
When my children were very young, I planted cucumbers while they hoped the plants would produce ham sandwiches. It does not work that way. We simply harvested cucumbers.
What we plant is what we’re going to grow. He says you don’t get good fruit from a bad tree. You don’t get bad fruit from a good tree.
You do not gather figs from thorns or grapes from a briar bush. The fruit reveals the nature of the plant. If our lives consistently bear bad fruit, that is a warning that something is wrong. We may not be the kind of tree we think we are, or we may not be sowing the seed we claim to sow. And so that’s calling us to pay attention to what’s being produced in our lives.
This connects with what the Holy Spirit later inspired in Galatians regarding the fruit of the Spirit, the things that will show up in our lives as we’re walking with Him. Things like love, joy, peace, patience, the list goes on. What kind of fruit are we bearing?
Does our fruit show that we are sowing spiritual things, or does it reveal a life of disobedience? See, if we’re going to represent Him well, it’s important that periodically we stop and take stock of the kind of fruit that we’re producing. To represent Him well, we must reflect a change of heart that only Jesus can produce.
Because he tells us in verse 45 that good things are brought out of the treasure of a good heart. Evil comes out of the treasure of an evil heart. Well, by God’s standards, all of our hearts are wicked and can only produce corrupt things.
Lasting change in behavior must begin with a changed heart. For our lives to reflect Christ, our hearts have to be changed to reflect Christ. If you are not yet a believer in Jesus Christ, this is not a checklist of actions by which you can make yourself right with God. The point of this is that none of us are right with God.
None of us can be right with God on our own. And the things that we need to show are things that only Jesus produces in us. When Jesus transforms our hearts,
as we trust Him as Savior and begin walking with Him, that change will appear in other areas of life. We must not resist the work He is doing in us. But this is not a religious checklist of things to do to be right with God.
What it takes to be right with God is simple and direct. We must recognize that we have sinned against a holy God, that our hearts are sinful before Him, and that we need more than self-improvement. We need complete and total transformation that only He can provide.
We need the forgiveness of sins that Jesus paid for on the cross. We need the hope and new life that He gives us through the resurrection. We need the change that He works in us every day through the Holy Spirit.
We receive all of that by acknowledging our sin, believing that Jesus Christ paid for it in full as our one and only hope, and asking Him for forgiveness.
